viii FOREWORD
' east ridge. The latter was a far more desperate venture. The flyers
could choose their day and weather, but the mountaineers, once
they were in the grip of the mountain, were at die weather's
mercy. That gallant enterprise had no single piece of good luck,
though one of its members got to within a few hundred feet of
the summit. The sympathy and admiration of the world must
go out to them; for dieir failure was in itself a splendid achieve-
ment.
The two expeditions were typical of the old and die new,
which must always co-exist in the world; die one using the
last discoveries of science to circumvent time and space; die
other, though assisted by science, relying upon the to ugliness
of the human frame and the power of the human limbs, which
since the cave-dwellers have been the Instruments of human
endeavour. I am certain that there is no young man who, if he
had the choice, would not prefer to stagger blind and panting
onto the snow-cap of Everest rather than, look down upon it
from the air. But hodi expeditions, however unlike in their
methods, had one thing in common—the spirit of hardihood
and adventure, and the members of both belong to the great
community of the lovers and conquerors of the high places. Mr.
Belloc has defined the creed of such as the * 'communing between
that homing creeping part of us which loves vineyards, dances,
and a slow movement among pastures, and that other part which
is only properly at home in heaven," Theophile Gautier, carried
out of himself by the contemplation of the Matterhorn, lias
given the brotherhood its charter—"Us sont la volonte protestant
contra Tobstacle aveugle, et ils plantent sur fin accessible le
drapeau de Intelligence humaine."